artiste-types often need tard wranglers to keep their zanier ideas in check (e.g., George Lucas) so It wouldn't surprise me if Kojima had some as well.
I'll add a game to the list:
Published in 2018, this is an archetypal artsy fartsy indie title - that I won't dignify calling a game. As so so proudly stated in its press kit, the developer's founder was the lead programmer on Gone Home (the infamous walking simulator that became a media darling which in part heralded the Gamergate backlash) and as such it is unsurprising that there is scant gameplay to be found here. Rather we are treated to a vision of 20th century America during the great depression where I'm sure the writer will us with hamfisted stories about how capitalism and Jim Crow are le bad (I'm assuming because I wouldn't be caught dead "playing" this "game"). However, unlike the early indie game boom, games journo dickriding, through the form of brownnosing articles and no-name awards, no longer commands customer attention and as such this title completely flopped on release (the devs even admitted in a post-mortem of the title that it was a financial failure) despite receiving plenty of the aforementioned (Even the money they wasted on getting a celebrity cameo from Sting did nothing to bolster their sales, how shocking!
). One can only hope that all pretentious games suffer an undignified fate such as this following their market release...
I wanted to like Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.
I've talked about it elsewhere on the forum. It's got several big problems. And for me the Communism is annoying but it's not a main problem, it actually fits very much in the literary tone of the times (like Steinbeck) and the general vibe of New Deal America. Though it's not executed elegantly or intelligently either, like, you know, Steinbeck.
But what pisses me off is that there's a really baller high concept and it just wasted it completely.
Story wise, I think the tarot card wolfman stuff is so tryhard and faggy. Just hated it off the bat. It undermines the tiny sliver of gameplay you're supposed to have in the form of resource management (there is no legitimate fail state) and the premise that the stories "grow in the telling" is both ruined by not having actual vignettes for them and their evolution being so limited. It needed way more branching content.
The vignettes are sometimes good but usually boring. They're the sort of thing that's pleasant to listen to the first time, but leaves no impression at all. I'll point again to Disco Elysium as an example of literary quality writing in a video game; the Evil Apes Duking It Out dialogue is seared permanently into my mind.
The characters are somewhat good ideas but a lot of them felt a bit too larger-than-life and one-dimensional, at least for what I could stomach.
The conclusion I came to is that what the game should have been - something that would have made it more interesting to play and more human and less artsy - is it should have been an RPG about being a Works Public Administration writer. In those days there was a project to give work to writers studying American folklore, including a very important collection of interviews with people like pioneers, Indians and former slaves. In the early 1900s there was this brief moment in time when it was the most normal thing in the world for people who had scalped Indians and lead cavalry charges to coexist with planes, TV and hamburgers and milkshakes. The WPA preserved that, something which would have been lost forever in all likelihood as nobody cares about old people.
Make it an RPG about a real person and now you've got a tribute their heroic effort. Now your character can actually interact with these people in meaningful ways. Pressures to survive can be made into meaningful gameplay. The Interview is your goal, you can actually fuck up the Interview, you may have to essentially go native in an area and get involved in their drama and solve their problems to work your way to the Interview. Interesting things could happen to you along the way.
Basically, whereas WTWTLW was a bunch of lame cryptid and ghost stories against the backdrop of the New Deal, I think it could have done better to have been about New Deal America itself with cryptids and ghost stories as part of that.
As long as the game was going to be primarily about walking on a mini-America map (the main thing that drew my attention), it needs more visual play. Even if the game was going to be the same thing it is now, it could have had a diorama-like America with animals, people, buildings and stuff all moving around doing things as you hitchhike. It could have had interactions, not necessarily with any gameplay purpose but just to fuck around with the environment, amuse yourself. That alone would have dramatically improved the experience, because the novelty wore off very, very fast when it became clear how dead and repetitive this was going to be.
